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Every Nechama Levendel and Nadav Bloch were born in Israel. They live in the Israeli artist village of Ein Hod. But they decided to live to gether and to travel together viewing the entire world as their global village, international Ein Hod. "We love to meet people, societies, we love to learn to enrich our horizons," said Nadav Bloch at Jerusalem Broadway, the kosher Manhattan restaurant.
They just returned from a visit to Mexico. Their new horizons mean more creative art work. They had many exhibitions together. They tend to develop, together, an idea, a concept and then go to work. Recently, they were approached in Haifa by the director of the Museum of the history of the pre-1948 illegal immigration to Palestine. It was illegal because of the British anti-Jewish policies as the mandatory power. It should be noted that from May 1939 to June 1949, Britain closed the gates of Palestine almost hermetically so that the refugees would not move to Palestine. It was their pro-Arab policy. In Hebrew we define the illegal immigrants as Maapilim.
This Museum in Haifa is also the Navy History Museum. The director told Nechama and Nadav that he plans to launch an exhibition to commemorate the 'Dakar Affair.' Dakar was an Israeli submarine which disappeared suddenly in January 1968. It was one of Israel's most well known national tragedies. Dakar has been an integral part of Israel's collective memory. But only on May 28, 1999, after 31 years of non-stop searching, Dakar was discovered near Crete Island, 360 km from Haifa, in the deepest point of the Mediterranean Sea. (Dakar origi-nally was an old British submarine named Totem). 69 Israelis died in Dakar, a national disaster.
The Museum plans the exhibition but the idea, the essence of it, is the brainchild of Nechama and Nadav: "We decided to use the anchor as the symbol of this tragedy. We conducted, first of all, deep research of the role of the anchor in history. We traveled to many placed and countries looking for anchors, new ones as well as ancient ones. The anchor has a meaning: "The right to anchor." We, the Jews, had linkage to the anchor, the right to anchor. Why? Because we are the wandering Jew. We were, always, people on the move, from country to country, from continent to continent. So the anchor symbolizes our history, explained Nadav Bloch who, today, is the "wandering Israeli": "...Abraham's family anchored in the Holy Land," said Bloch. Our history links to the will of anchoring or to the experience of lifting the anchors.
Artists Nechama and Nadav documented the world of anchors and the "right to anchor." Then they decided to base their Dakar exhibition on 69 pictures of anchors. Each anchor represents one of the 69 Israeli heroes who are still buried inside the sea. They died for the right of Israel to have the right to anchor. Nechama and Nadav exhibited their works from 1995 in Israel, Germany, and Scotland.
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